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Sep. 6th, 2025 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsgenarti and I have been working our very slow but delighted way through We Are Lady Parts, the British sitcom about an all-Muslim punk rock band composed of opinionated women with beautiful and compelling faces. I'd been seeing a lot of gifsets of these faces before we watched the show and I am pleased to report that they are even more beautiful and compelling at full length. For those of you who have missed the gifsets, please enjoy Lady Parts performing "Villain Era":The two most protagonist-y protagonists are Saira, the band's lead singer/guitarist, who is at all times extremely punk rock, and Amina, a stressed-out trad-Muslim scientist with terrible stage fright, who really has to work to access her inner punk rock. The cast is rounded out with Ayesha, the angry lesbian drummer; Bisma, who plays the role of maternal peacemaker until she starts to chafe at it; and Momtaz, the band's go-getter manager. The first season focuses mostly on the question of whether Amina can conquer her own inhibitions enough to contribute her excellent guitar skills and huge Disney eyes to the band after Saira press-gangs her into joining them. The second season brings the whole band up against the music industry more generally, and the various ways that the public pressure of moderate fame starts to push each of them into re-examining their self-image and relationships to their music and identity. It's a good show! I liked it very much!
Also, like everyone else in the world, we have recently watched KPop Demon Hunters. Also a very good time featuring banger music tracks -- I'd seen it described as 'a series of really good music videos' and broadly I agree with this assessment -- plus twenty pounds of fun kdrama tropes stuffed into a five-pound bag. Probably would not have felt compelled to write anything about it except for the fact that by an accident of timing, we ended up watching the season finale of Lady Parts the day after we watched KPop Demon Hunters which made for a very funny accidental wine pairing. Both funny and telling to go from KPop Demon Hunters -- which gestures broadly at a theme of 'it's good to be yourself! it's bad to curate off parts of yourself because you're afraid of what people might say about them!' without ever once daring to suggest that perhaps The KPop Industrial Complex might be part of the problem -- to the season finale of We Are Lady Parts, in which Lady Parts decide to blow up their relationship with their controlling label by going full Chumbawumba and dramatically pirating their own music for free release on the internet. Obviously the show does not linger in this triumphant moment on the fact that they are about to get sued for a bajillion dollars (though, perhaps, if there is an S3!) but the concern I felt about this on behalf of my beloved Lady Parts was as nothing to the concern I felt for the KPop Demon Hunter girls when at the end of their movie they happily cut short the vacation they'd been looking forward to all movie to instead go have More Fan Interactions. God forbid a film designed to appeal to fans suggest that a star have any greater desires in their life than to delight their fandom!
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Date: 2025-09-06 10:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 03:28 pm (UTC)I enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters as well - it also has great songs - but yeah, I can see how the two back-to-back would be both entertaining and telling.
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Date: 2025-09-08 07:34 pm (UTC)I admit to some reservations about the KPop hunters message of "just reveal this deeply personal aspect of yourself, there won't be any consequences." As much because it has been a running theme in a lot of kid-oriented movies recently as anything in particular from this movie. Like I think I understand the reason and the laudable sentiments behind it, and maybe I am just reading a privacy-eroding undercurrent into it that is just an unavoidable part of that particular framing of celebrity for narrative purposes.
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Date: 2025-09-13 12:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 05:04 pm (UTC)I really enjoyed Kpop demon hunters,
but of the two, I thought Lady Parts was better.
(Of course, with two seasons, it had more hours to work with.)
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Date: 2025-09-13 12:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 08:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2025-09-07 07:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-08 06:56 pm (UTC)I had the same reservation about the end of KPop Demon Hunters. For goodness sake, let the girls rest! Surely they have earned six months of naps at this point!
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Date: 2025-09-13 12:58 pm (UTC)The ending (and a couple other points throughout the film -- "don't touch our fans!", etc.) really felt like a sort of pandering to fandom in a way that made me a little uncomfortable; don't worry, fans, you're not part of the problem, and your faves love you just as much as you love them! they will give up their vacations for you in a heartbeat and they WILL not mind!
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Date: 2025-09-15 07:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-09 06:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-13 12:59 pm (UTC)